Yes, yes. I didn’t mean we should only do the website.
We should leverage existing channels.
Perhaps we can form a little committee that could meet monthly or something, brainstorming ideas like this, divide the workload etc.?
I’m absolutely up for meeting occasionally to go through ideas and assign action items as people are able to handle them. As I said, I cannot really take the lead on this one, but invite me and I’ll do my best to be there.
Ok, great Chris. I’m going to give this some thought.
I’m trying to wrap my head around what the scope and nature of this committee would/should be. It does seem like there are opportunities to do something good here.
Lets see what we hear from the board meeting tomorrow.
Thank you, Simon! I went looking for a summary of anything that may have been discussed at this meeting. However, it looks like board meeting minutes have not been posted since May 6. I hope we can get a summary of any discussion or decisions during the board meeting.
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That’s a bit odd… I’ll investigate.
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This thread started with the specific hope of enlisting people to help with a one-time message. It seems clear that the Haskell community would benefit from sustained, long-term efforts to increase awareness of opportunities to financially support the Haskell ecosystem.
In light of this, I’m proposing we start the “Haskell Funding Advocates” team.
It could have the mandate to:
- increase the visibility of opportunities to financially support the Haskell community infrastructure and open source projects written in Haskell (this includes increasing the visibility of funding opportunities through github and patreon etc)
- serve as a focal point for sharing ideas and coordinating efforts to achieve the primary goal of increasing visibility.
- be respectful to the community by:
- being helpfully informative rather than intrusive
- not pressuring people to make donations
- operate with transparency
- encourage feedback from the community on financing related concerns
(By the way, I’m not an expert here. I’m willing to take the lead and make things happen, but I’m more than willing to let someone else lead and I would happily support them in their efforts.)
How does that sound?
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This sounds great! However, I think we should wait until minutes are available from the Haskell Foundation board meeting on Thursday. From my conversations, there were some definite ideas expressed there, and a direction that I think is very exciting, but I’ll wait for the official record to express them because I am not on the board and would only be reporting second-hand interpretations. I think several people from this thread and other threads are likely to be involved, and I hope you’ll be there, as well. Looking forward to working on this in the very near future!
Thanks Chris (@cdsmith) , you are right about waiting.
(I am still meaning to wait as well, but for some reason I also thought that perhaps the sooner I could get my thoughts out on that the better.)
I’m looking forward to hearing the results of the board meeting!
Thanks again.
Again these thoughts will probably need to be altered in light of what ever the foundation comes up with…
Somehow what we are talking about (and already doing) is very intimately connected to the Haskell Foundation so coordinating with them and following their guidance makes perfect sense.
There is also the other side, like Andrew said that there are advantages to us being (perceived as) a part of the community somewhat removed from the Haskell Foundation (personally I think of the foundation as part of the community as well but some may not see it that way). For example: “Hi I’m John with the foundation…” sounds different than “hey guys lets (i.e. the community) help get the foundation off to a great start…”. So, I’m just saying that that is an interesting factor here.
Also, as you mentioned there are financing activites through github, patreon, google SOC, maybe your community grants proposal…corporations paying people to work… It would be nice to be able to look at finances holistically within the community.
Its going to be a balancing act of working under the guidance/approval of the Haskell Foundation vs allowing people to run with the inspiration of their ideas. I’m looking forward to having more clarity on that.
Hi all!
@cdsmith asked me during HF Office Hours today how many new recurring individual donors these efforts had brought in, and it took me a lot longer than expected to answer that question. I was knee deep in data entry to add the TWENTY new donors! That brings us to 33 recurring individual donors!
It was, I think, the most fun data entry I’ve ever done.
I would like to help facilitate your work on this. The Board meeting was much more of a brainstorming session than anything else, but the key takeaway is we would like @human154 and @cdsmith, if willing, to lead a group that can offer proposals to the HF Board, if HF resources are needed, or just take actions where appropriate to bring in more individual donations and involvement in the HF.
Myself and one or two Board members would join the discussions and offer our time and effort to help out. Of course, anyone from the community is welcome and encourage to join and help.
Administration is my job, so I’m happy to schedule the meetings, take notes, etc. What say you?
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Basically I’m enthusiastic to be a part of this.
That’s great news about the increase in number of donors! Are they being thanked somehow? That’s something I wouldn’t mind doing, i.e. physically sending them a thank you email and invite them to write a post on that discourse thread: “tell us! why did you donate…” Obviously the text content can come from you. Let me know if I could help with that.
How does this post (in the following link) mesh with what the board is proposing? Notice especially that I wanted the scope to be larger than the Haskell Foundation. We could add to this the idea of bringing proposals to the foundation.
I guess if you all are ok with that name Haskell Funding Advocates for the group, I will grab the domain and I could start putting up a site? (HaskellFundingAdvocates.org)?
I like the idea of you being a part of meetings and facilitating this.
I certainly welcome the prospect of working with @cdsmith
It’s a little embarrassing to admit but honestly until the other day I didn’t even realize everything was actually ready for HF to start taking individual donations. I had been ready to donate for a while but was just waiting until I could (I am donating now).
Of course all we can do to encourage donations will be helpful, but I think perhaps one thing that would be good is simply turning up the volume knob on letting people know they can donate.
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@rebeccaskinner I agree completely that focusing efforts on “letting people know they can donate” is a priority. (That was the original point of this thread). We were kind of holding back a tiny bit just to see how the foundation felt about us kind of getting involved in their business so to speak. @myShoggoth just let us know that we basically have the support of the foundation to proceed.
I think (roughly) this is a message that we can use to call people to action:
“It’s been almost a year since the new Haskell Foundation has been established and it has received donations from less than 40 individuals. That’s probably because lots of people who love Haskell aren’t even aware that it is now possible to make donations. Lets help the new Haskell Foundation off to a great start!”
One of the key items I would put first on our agenda is dividing up the work of getting (basically) that message out to different corners of the Haskell community.
After that there are lots of different things we can do to keep the possibility of donating in people’s awareness (without directly just asking for money), such as keeping alive the Discourse thread “tell us, why did you donate to the Haskell Foundation?”. I think its quite nice to read people’s entries in there and it also serves our purpose to keep the idea of the value of donating in people’s awareness.
If anyone reading this would like to help with raising people’s awareness of opportunities to financially support Haskell’s ecosystem, please let me know!
Matthias, that is indeed what the board would like to do. But I would strongly urge you do do this under the auspices of the Foundation – providing an umbrella for this kind of thing is precisely what the Foundation was created to do!
- The Haskell community has lots of separate, somewhat-disconnected groups, each doing good things, but sometimes running into the sand when a particular person moves on. A project run by volunteers (like all projects), but under the auspices of the Foundation is more likely to be sustainable in the medium to long term.
- In the past corporate donors could give money to GHC, or Cabal, or whatever – but the Foundation is a more attractive organisation to give to, because it is explicitly a non-profit organisation designed to support the whole community and Haskell ecosystem. I hope that it will build up a reservoir of trust that money given to the Foundation will be well spent, and I hope that individuals may extend it the same trust.
- Anytime you handle money there is a lot of infrastructure (from bank accounts to governance) you need to think about. That’s all done for the Foundation; no need to reinvent it.
I am not saying that we should only invite individual donors to support the Foundation itself. Personally I am quite attracted by the idea of a community fund, run by the Foundation, earmarked for small scale individual projects (details to be developed by the working group). But I am urging you to do the whole thing under the umbrella of the Foundation. It’s what it’s for!
Thank you for being so active and creative on this front.
This really made me think!
In a way my answer is easy since…I’m eager to work under the guidance of the Haskell Foundation board, and I welcome working with members of the board who want to engage/review the operations of what we might call the “Haskell Funding Advocates” team (if that is the name we want to go with).
Agreeing on this would also be fairly easy for me because my priority is to find some way to contribute and somehow be a part of the success of Haskell and the Haskell Foundation.
Also I recognize that there is a lot here that you would know and I don’t. It’s really hard to over state that one! 
On the other hand… with my simple view of things, there was no conflict in my mind between working closely with the Haskell Foundation and having a scope that goes beyond raising awareness about opportunities to donate directly to the Foundation (i.e. also raising awareness about opportunities to donate on github and patreon and others). Again, if there is conflict there, then this idea of a wider scope is not even a critical point for me, and a I would probably just let the issue die quietly except that maybe this is getting at something that could be valuable for me/us all to have clarity about.
The only reason this thought of scope came up for me is that @cdsmith had the idea that it could be valuable to the community to collect on one page all the different ways that people can contribute financially to the Haskell Ecosystem. (Hopefully I didn’t misrepresent his idea too much) That specific suggestion struck me as a great idea. If Chris didn’t want to do that himself or have it done some other way, then that would be something I would have liked to take on myself. Doing that seems like a simple, useful way to make a contribution which could be in line with the mission of the “Haskell Funding Advocates” (i.e. a mission of raising awareness in a useful way) and also with the mission of the Foundation to help nurture and co-ordinate the community/ecosystem. Again, I’m just saying what my thinking was before your last post.
Again either way this is not a deal breaker. I’m enthusiastic either way. But somehow there is still an issue there that is not fully resolved for me. On one hand I appreciate the co-ordination and structure that the foundation can bring to funding, on the other hand I also appreciate what @jhenahan says:
I clearly see issues with people asking for money individually if its not transparent how much they are receiving. That could be a clear conflict for the Foundation to be involved in supporting that.
I appreciate the points you made, and yet I’m still torn on this.
Maybe there is an argument to be made here that would be similiar to the justification for windows having the windows subsystem for linux. i.e. maintain a central role by coordinating/supporting access to the (funding) alternatives.
…so I still have some thinking to do about this, but count me as willing either way.
The only reason this thought of scope came up for me is that @cdsmith had the idea that it could be valuable to the community to collect on one page all the different ways that people can contribute financially to the Haskell Ecosystem
That could perfectly well be one of the recommendations of a working group, convened by you and Chris, under the auspices of the Foundation. The purpose of the Foundation is not to fund the Foundation – it is to benefit the Haskell ecosystem! So the Foundation might say “please join the Core Libraries Committee” (as Emily our CTO did yesterday) or, as you suggest, “here are several ways to contribute financially to the Haskell ecosystem”. We’d have to see what the working group comes up with.
Do you see the distinction I’m making between (a) the working group as an activity of the Foundation, and (b) the specifics of what that working group recommends?
Of course, if we then want the Foundation to help with executing the recommendations, the Board will need to support them. And I hope it will … that’s one reason for wanting a couple of board members to serve on the working group. But, to say it again, the goal is to nourish and enrich the Haskell community, not to fund the Foundation. (Of course, to have a Foundation at all we need enough money to run it; but we are currently doing reasonably well on that side, thanks to generous support of our corporate donors.)
Does that help at all?
Yes that helps! I see the distinction you are making.
Andrew said:
Are you in agreement with that characterization?
I do hear you saying that promoting non-Haskell-Foundation funding is something you would need to be brought to the board.
Maybe there is a misunderstanding? There doesn’t seem to be a way to quote multiple lines properly…so just to be clear, when I referenced this quote (below) in a previous post directed at @myShoggoth, the important text for me didn’t appear in the visible portion of the quote: (unless the down arrow is clicked)
I’m meaning to quote the whole post. Specifically the important part of this for me is trying to define the scope of a group. I’m wanting to know if we (already) have the go-ahead from the foundation with the group as outlined in the specific points there.
If that scope is already acceptable to the board, Andrew and also Chris (maybe excluding the github etc part) then I see myself as being able to launch into lots of (raising awareness related) things under that mandate. Before launching in, we can have an ongoing lightweight process of putting ideas forward (for raising funding awareness) to our new group and as long as we, including the board members who are working with the group don’t see a problem with it, we can move forward with lots of things that are consistent with that mandate (all basically communications/media related).
So in the points of that mandate, because I wanted to be clear about how we are defining the purpose of the group and I want to have a kind of license from the Foundation to execute on it, (under the supervision of the involved board members) I mentioned github and patreon because that could be a grey area, and I wanted to have clarity there.
Making recommendations to the board could be seen as a separate activity(?)…but we could add it to the mandate.
Should we make the whole idea of the “Haskell Funding Advocates” (roughly as per that post) also a recommendation to the board or is it safe to move forward with that mandate and just take out the bit about github funding being in scope for the group for now (and then potentially make that a proposal)?
Sorry if i wasn’t clear enough or missing something. What you wrote was helpful. Clearly, I will require your patience with understanding the expectations.
The HF exists to improve the Haskell ecosystem and drive more adoption. We are not tied to a particular way of accomplishing that, and we’re looking for both ways of doing so, and volunteers to make it happen. So from that point of view, what you’re proposing is exactly what we need!
I suggest we figure a good time to meet, advertise it to get more participants, and discuss the details there.
Let me clarify what I meant by taking things to the HF Board. If the group were to come up with a plan for getting the word out to a wide audience about to how financially support the Haskell community and wanted to buy ads, or hire a graphic designer to make the materials look really nice, or produce videos, etc., you could take that plan to the Board and they could approve adding it to the HF budget.
Absolutely, we would love to have more individual donors supporting the HF, but the goal of that is to accomplish great things with the community! Spending HF resources to improve the Haskell community is exactly the right thing.
When works to talk?
Thanks for your positivity.
I’m off of work to care for family so I have an extremely flexible schedule in the eastern time zone of North America
We could set up an agenda here, in this thread, unless you have a better idea.